(01-25-2015, 02:33 PM)Sandaoguo Wrote: ....

I'll answer these!

1. If our military was active, the benefits would be "power" in NationStates, which is mostly in the form of recognition/reputation. However, I don't know of a single military force that adopted duality (raiding and defending) and become any sort of power in the game. All powerful military forces -- in other words, those forces that are actually a net benefit to their regions -- are raider or defender, or imperialist or a flavor of those. There are forces that nominally "raid and defend," but in reality they tend to do one or the other.

The issue with trying to have a dual military is that you alienate not only allies (defender allies who get angry at us raiding, and raider allies who get angry at us defending), but you turn off a large pool of recruits that want to either raid or defend, but who don't want to do both. This is a classic conundrum, and it's one of the several reasons we abandoned "Independence" two months ago (which was a position that advocated duality). In fact, it's interesting that North East Somerset is here, because his is one of the prime examples of how allies get upset when we raid or defend "too much." He helped orchestrate the most destructive diplomatic crisis between us and our ally Europeia, because he and other others thought we were leaning too much towards defending. One of the major problems with our military, as long as we are not defender or raider, is that we'll always have problems like that. There will always be a diplomatic crisis over the smallest of things, because everybody wants us to be on their side and fight against their enemies, but we "want" to straddle the middle.

If we were to have a clear military message -- we will defend the weak; or we will crush the small; or we will colonize the world -- we might be able to have a successful military, assuming we could get good leadership. However, that has been anathema to TSP for at least the past two or three years that I've been here. If I thought TSP was ready or willing to "choose a side," I would argue doing that, because that would also solve the more systemic problems we have with our military. But I don't think TSP is ready, because our region just doesn't like military operations when they actually have consequence, so I think demilitarization would be greatly beneficial to the peace of our region.

2. A "military" is a force that goes outside the region to conduct operations. They go into other regions and either attack them for a small period of time (raid), defend them against those attacks (defend), or attack and occupy the regions for a substantial amount of time. Defenders also "liberate" regions that are being occupied, which is basically reverse-raiding, in that defenders go into the region, take back the delegate seat, and give it back to the original delegate.

A "guard" would primarily remain inside the region, providing endorsements to the delegate. When an ally is in need -- during an attack, or when they need help getting a newly-elected delegate to the seat -- the guard would be deployed. That is how I understand a guard, but Kris might be able to explain his idea better.

3. In terms of safety, a "military" does not keep us safe. That's because its primary purpose is to be outside of the region. It doesn't protect the delegate, but rather exerts our power abroad. If anything, having a military that conducts missions outside of the region does place us at some level of risk, because no matter if you raid or defend, you get enemies.

A "guard," on the other hand, would be a boon to security. The idea is that it would boost the number of endorsements given to the delegate, which makes it harder for anybody to coup us. Also, when the guard is sent outside of the region, it's on a non-controversial missions that don't create enemies.

(01-25-2015, 11:26 AM)North East Somerset Wrote: I agree of course TSP may have been more successful in cultural matters than military ones, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to cut off the opportunity of future military success simply because it isn't having a major contribution at the moment.

Kris seems to be handling your argument well enough himself, so I'll leave the bulk of responding up to him. I just want to say that this is not an "at the moment" issue. No incarnation of TSP's military has ever been active enough for the benefits to outweigh the costs, not even SB's antifa era.

Thank you for your answer to these questions. Back in a darker part of the history of TSP the "Military" had a very different function, in that it remained in TSP and endorsed everyone on the Delegates endo list, then if someone was noticed to be getting up there in the endo count then they would remove their endo from said person and a "watch" was put on them. The Delegate was the one to contact the person/nation in question and would let the Cabinet and the "Military" know what the response was, if one was forth coming. Sometimes, like in the instance of Monkeybutts, the nation would move out of the region for a day then come back the next day.

Anyway this certainly gave me what I needed to know.